This Day in Labor History: April 7, 1947. Telephone operators for the major phone companies walked off the job. This action was the precursor to the formation of the Communication Workers of America, one of the most important unions in the nation today!!!!!! Telephone operators struggled with low pay. A large chunk of the workforce, since telephones required the direct connections of lines, it was also dominated by women.

This Day in Labor History: April 4, 1936. Workers won the Strutwear strike in Minneapolis, a significant victory specifically for the women who made up most of this workforce. This is a useful strike to explore issues of gender and working class culture in the Great Depression. In 1934, the Teamsters local in Minneapolis, led by a group of Trotskyites that put it at odds with the international union, went on one of the most epic strikes of the Great Depression, part of that amazing, transformational year of militant organizing.

This Day in Labor History: March 17, 1921. The Kronstadt Rebellion was crushed by Soviet military forces. This moment was the final nail in the coffin to any idea that workers would have the ability to protest their new proletarian government. One of the great contradictions of Marxism is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This Day in Labor History: March 7, 1990. Jay Lovestone died. Let's talk about this character who started as a communist and then became so rabidly anti-communist that he sought to undermine any social justice unionism in any global labor movement. It's a sad story! Jacob Liebstein was born in 1897 into a Jewish family in what today in Belarus. His father immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s and then sent for his family in 1907. He then grew up on the Lower East Side.

This Day in Labor History: February 26, 1972. A Pittston Coal Company slurry dam collapsed in Logan County, West Virginia. The ensuing flood of coal slurry would kill 125 people and demonstrate once again the horrific contempt the coal industry has for the people of West Virginia Coal slurry is basically the toxic leftovers of modern industrial coal production. This was less of an issue in the days of underground mining, but with strip mining and later mountaintop removal, large scale residue became a real problem.

This Day in Labor History: October 28, 1793. Eli Whitney submitted a patent for his invention known as the cotton gin. Perhaps more than any technology in American history, this invention profoundly revolutionized American labor! Let's talk about its complex legacies! Creating the modern cotton industry meant the transition from agricultural to industrial labor in the North with the rise of the factory system and the rapid expansion and intensification of slavery in the South to produce the cotton.

This Day in Labor History: October 27, 1948. An air inversion trapped the pollution spewed out by U.S. Steel-owned factories in Donora, Pennsylvania. The Donora Smog killed 20 people and sickened 6000 others. Let's talk about this environmental horror spawned by corporations! That picture above was taken at noon on the day.

This Day in Labor History: October 16, 1859. John Brown launches his epic, if insane, raid on Harpers Ferry to steal arms and start a slave rebellion. Let's talk about this critical incident in American history! First, we have to remember why this matters for labor history, which is that slavery is a labor system.

We always focus on the racism of slavery, and there's good reason for that, but the actual reason slavery existed was to maintain a permanent labor force forever.

This Day in Labor History: October 15, 1970. Richard Nixon signed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Let's talk about RICO took a veneer of corruption in a few unions and used it to increase the war on unions in the late 20th century! Like any large organization with significant financial reserves, unions can sometimes end up with corrupt leaders. Sometimes unions, particularly some trades and longshoremen locals, were fully mob-influenced.

This Day in Labor History: September 15, 1845. !omen working in the Pittsburgh textile mills met in Market Square to discuss the necessity of fighting to cut their days from 12 to 10 hours without a reduction in pay. Let's talk about the key early strikes in American history! This led to a strike and a violent confrontation three weeks later that demonstrated both the militancy early workers could show in fighting for their rights and the very difficult challenges they faced in winning a strike.

This Day in Labor History: September 10, 1897. Luzerne County sheriff deputies slaughtered 19 unarmed coal miners striking outside of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Let's talk about the Lattimer Massacre and the use of state violence against peaceful strikes in the Gilded Age!! The strikers, primarily German, Polish, Lithuanian, and Slovak immigrants, were fighting for decent wages and working conditions in the one of the most brutal industries in the nation.

This Day in Labor History: August 26, 1922. The Trade Union Educational League under the leadership of William Z. Foster publicly met for the first time. Let's talk about this crucial intersection between the Communist Party and labor movement in the years after the USSR began! The pre-1917 labor movement had a panopoly of radicalism in its ranks. Of course, many workers were not radical at all.

This Day in Labor History: August 22, 1945. 5 airline stewardesses, as they were then called, formed the Air Line Stewardesses Association, wanting a labor union to give them a voice on a demanding, difficult job! Let's talk about the development of flight attendant unionism! The position of flight attendant began on May 15, 1930, when a woman named Ellen Church worked at what was then known as a “skygirl.” Women worked very hard, but had to look glamorous while doing it.

This Day in Labor History: August 6, 1944. Philadelphia’s transit strike over hiring black drivers ends. We need to talk about how white workers have chosen racial solidarity over class solidarity again and again and again. And this isn't some plot by employers either. White workers need no help in being racist, let me assure you.

This Day in Labor History: July 27, 1989. Workers at the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, rejected United Auto Workers representation by a 2-1 margin. Let's talk about the failures to organize the South! Nearly as soon as the CIO organized northern plants in the 1930s and 1940s, they became frightened at what would happen if they did not organize the nation. Companies could simply pick up and move factories to non-union states.

This Day in Labor History: June 27, 1905. The Industrial Workers of the World holds its opening convention in Chicago! Let's talk about this moment! The IWW had many roots. Socialists and anarchists looked to form a broad-based labor organization. The Western Federation of Miners, a radical union with strongholds in the Rocky Mountains, wanted to expand their form of industrial unionism nationwide.

Pat Robertson is dead and every decent American is glad of it. Here's my obituary of this monster.

lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/robert… A few highlights: Robertson's father was a senator who was so far right that even other Dixiecrats were glad LBJ had him primaried in 1966.

All the talk from the west coast about being used to fires is only the last 20 years and especially the last 6. It was not this way in the 1990s. In the Northwest, the idea of "fire season" is something that is 2017 to the present. This is all very new there too. The modern era of fire in the West begins with the Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico in 2000. For decades before that, these giant fires were very rare. Much of that has to do with fire suppression that made the whole thing worse, yes. But still.

This Day in Labor History: June 7, 1943. 16 black workers at Buckeye Cotton Oil Company in Memphis, a Proctor & Gamble owned operation, went on a wildcat strike in protest of continued workplace discrimination!! This was despite federal orders to integrate the defense industry, a sign of the poor enforcement of the Roosevelt administration anti-discrimination initiatives.

This Day in Labor History: June 6, 1835. Coal workers in Philadelphia walked off the job for shorter hours and higher wages. This soon spread across the city and 20,000 workers struck. Let's talk about the first general strike in American history! In early America, the standard working hours were sunrise to sunset. This could fluctuate depending on the needs of the employer, especially those using slaves on southern plantations, But this was the standard.

This Day in Labor History: May 31, 1889. The Johnstown Flood kills 2,200 people thanks to a flood caused by a broken dam on an elite hunting club run by Pennsylvania's capitalist elite, led by the vile steel capitalist Henry Clay Frick! Let's talk class and "natural" disaster! The Johnstown Flood is not only a horrible disaster but deeply reflective of class divisions during the Gilded Age and the complete lack of legal or moral responsibility the wealthy had toward the working class.